Sail of Stone (47 page)

“I remember that recluse in the film,” said Winter. “He lived in some shack on the beach.”

“Maybe we’ll find him here,” said Macdonald.

“I remember the inn, too, and the innkeeper.”

“It’s still here,” said Macdonald.

They were standing outside Pennan Inn. Temporarily closed due to bad weather.

“We could have stayed overnight here,” said Macdonald. He looked up at the sky. It was starting to grow dark.

Winter turned around.

“I recognize that telephone booth,” he said, nodding at the red kiosk on the other side of the strip of road.

“I’ve never been here,” said Macdonald.

A woman came out of one of the houses, seventy yards away. She walked toward them and greeted them as she passed. She was wearing a kerchief but was no older than they were. A few cars were parked beside theirs.

“Excuse me,” said Macdonald.

“On a very clear day you can see Orkney,” the woman had said.

“How about the northern lights?” Winter had asked.

“Oh, you’ve seen the film.” It was a statement, for the most part. “You’ve come to see it for yourselves?”

“We’re not here for that reason,” Macdonald had said.

She had taken them to the next-to-last house in the row. Everything was closed and shut up as they walked along the quay.

In 1900, three hundred people had lived here, she had said. Now twenty people lived in Pennan permanently.

They walked past a construction site. Winter thought of Dallas.

“The first new construction in a hundred years!” said the woman.

They stood in front of a cottage. She knocked hard three times.

“Her hearing is bad.”

After the fifth knock of her knuckles, there was rustling behind the heavy door, which still had its red base color.

“Mrs. Watt?” said the woman.

The door creaked open. The face of an older woman became visible. She had small, sharp eyes.

“Aye?”

“Mrs. Watt, these gentlemen would like to ask you a couple of questions.”

They climbed back uphill in the car. The dolphin house they’d parked in front of had been the inn in
Local Hero.
In the summer, dolphins played out in the water of Moray Firth.

Mrs. Watt had a memory that came and went. In addition, she had spoken a kind of Scottish that seemed to be too much even for Macdonald. Once she had nodded to herself and said, “Gie yehr ain fish guts to year ain sea myaves.”

“What did that mean?” Winter had asked when they were standing outside again.

“‘Give your own fish guts to your own seagulls,’” Macdonald had answered, “but I don’t know what it
means.
” He began to walk. “Maybe that you should take care of yourself and to hell with everyone else.”

At the summit there was only sky and sea over the edge.

Mrs. Watt had spoken about “a stranger.”

He had lived by himself in a little hovel next to the Cullykhan caves in the cove next to Pennan Bay.

“But there’s nothing there now,” she had said.

They had climbed over there, but there was nothing there.

“He was there and then he was gone,” she had said.

“When was that?”

“The war. During the war.”

“What did he do?”

“What everyone else did, I assume. Smuggled.”

“Did you meet this stranger?” Winter had asked Mrs. Watt.

“No.”

“Did you see him?”

“No.”

“Where did he come from?”

“No one knew. Not that I know of. And no one asked. Not then.” She had squinted her sharp eyes, which were like black stones. “They had probably checked him out and I guess he was allowed to stay.”

“They? Who are they?” Macdonald had asked.

“The men in the village.”

“Are any of them still here?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“Not from that time.”

“What happened to the stranger?” Winter had asked.

“I guess he’s just gone.”

They drove west, toward Macduff and Banff.

“There were lots of people who came and went back then,” said Macdonald.

Winter didn’t answer. He looked out over the sea below the precipice. One quick movement of the wheel and they would be flying.

“What are you thinking about, Erik?”

“About something I’ve seen and yet not seen,” said Winter.

“A common problem for a policeman,” said Macdonald.

“Fuck.”

“When? Where?”

“Recently,” said Winter. “During this trip.”

“Think back.”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

There were some dark streaks across the sky. The sun disappeared. Macdonald thought about putting in a CD but he hesitated.

“It has to do with the photograph,” said Winter. “Of Osvald.”

Macdonald looked up at the sky.

“We’ll have to find an inn to stay overnight.”

Winter nodded.

“I know the place,” said Macdonald. “The Seafield Hotel in Cullen. It’s a classic. I didn’t remember it before, but now I do. You can try Cullen skink there!”

H
e heard them talking behind his back. He wanted to know who they were, and why they were there. He didn’t move. He had seen them arrive, and he understood.

She didn’t say anything when they ordered.

Maybe she understood too.

It was only a small favor. He knew that he could ask her. A single conversation. A simple question.

But he didn’t trust her anymore.

He had decided to tell everything. It was time. When had he made his decision? It had to do with the sea. The loneliness.

After all these years. It was easier at first.

When he was going to leave it all, it was harder. Not hard to leave; he had longed to do that.
Longed.
But he didn’t want to do it alone, not now.

Who could believe it would happen like this? That the boy …

Take the car, the boy had said. I don’t need it.

There was a shine in the boy’s eyes.

It’s all over now, the boy had said.

The boy prayed, he prayed all the time. His good sense seemed to disappear.

It had been tranquil by the sea. It was a peaceful beach.

Drive!
the boy had screamed. He had hesitated.

Drive!
The boy screamed again and his white hair stood straight up. His body looked old. It was old, but not as old as his.

The boy was blue in the face. His heart. The blue color disappeared. The boy walked on his own on the other side of the little lake, and he prayed.

Jesus!

A cry over the mountains.

We are all lost, he had said afterward. I will wash away our sins, wash us. I am glad that you sent for me.
Drive now!

At night the dreams came back. Dreams of gold, of silver, of the money that destroyed everything.

How often had he sat with this pistol in his hand? First it was the threat, soon after. When he was staying hidden in cliffs, huts, on rotten ships. He had shot once.

Then there were the thoughts of doing it by his own hand. On his own.

He didn’t know what would happen.

He carried it with him night and day.

He’d had it when he heard the voices in the Three Kings, when he saw them. They came from the other world.

Now his memories flowed on, flowed up. There was water everywhere; the sea washed over him. He had placed the dinghy in the shadow of the waves. The
Marino
had already begun to sink.

It was necessary. Egon had already been lost then. The trawler was lost.

He had felt Frans’s face in his hands. Jesus! There had been no one to listen out there. God wasn’t listening; not God’s son. On the beach there were only stones. He made his choice. No, not then. It was long before.

There was still money in the oilcloth bags. The weapons were on the bottom or had been carried farther north, like the bodies.

The boy’s boy hadn’t asked any questions.

The boy’s boy.

Here!

Bring it here!

They would never find him. Never! His face was different, his body. His name. His life, what was left.

He saw them out on the street, but it was a coincidence. They had been standing in front of the telephone booth, a coincidence. They had walked by.

None of them would find out!

A
neta Djanali was sitting in Halders’s kitchen. She had wrapped a blanket around herself; she was freezing and the kitchen was the warmest place. Hannes and Magda were at a birthday party at a house three blocks away. It wasn’t evening yet. Halders was making a quiche for some reason. A good smell was coming from the oven. Halders let Lucinda Williams sing from the living room in her cracked voice, lonely girls … heavy blankets cover lonely girls.

Aneta had had a short conversation with Anette Lindsten. Anette had been on her way down to the house by the sea, she said.

Was she running away again?

Everything about this was running away, sometimes invisibly.

This was part of the hell that struck the women, she thought. A horrid combination of guilt and fear and control and ownership.

She didn’t want to think about it, but she couldn’t stop.

It was about a woman’s right to her own life. That was exactly what it was about.

Control over the woman’s life. What it was about.

She didn’t doubt for a second what it was about for Anette. Hans Forsblad wouldn’t give up control,
would not
give up control. Nothing stopped him. He stayed hidden, but he was
there
. Aneta had seen his eyes. His eyes when he looked at her.

Two things were missing from her home.

She had discovered this while she was waiting for her colleagues from Lorensberg, or maybe it was after they were there.

The shell that had stood next to the telephone on the shelf in the hall. It was large and shimmered blue. It was almost transparent. Aneta had found it in a cove outside Särö, and it had been standing in the same place for two years and she hadn’t even dusted it, as far as she remembered. The traces the snail left behind had been visible, a bare spot in a sea of fine dust.

And Kontômé. The Kontômé mask on the wall in the hall was gone. Who would want to steal that? It had no financial value.

Kontômé was there to show her the path through the future.

The person who had gotten into her apartment had taken these things with them.

She knew who it was.

Anette had sounded out of breath on the telephone. Aneta had heard the roaring sound of a motor.

“She’s afraid for her life,” she said to Halders, wrapping the blanket more tightly around herself.

Lucinda Williams sang in a broken voice about broken lives and broken words. “Can’t you play something else, Fredrik? That’s making me shiver even more. And freeze.”

Halders was about to take out the quiche. He placed it on a trivet and walked out of the kitchen and Lucinda Williams was cut off in the middle of the song about the half sentences. After ten seconds of silence she heard beautiful vocal harmonies and a bright and gentle melody.

“Will the Beach Boys do?” Halders said from the door. “Is that warm and sunny enough for you?”

“At least on the surface,” she said.

“Do you know your Beach Boys?” Halders asked.

“No,” she said, listening again. “But you can hear that something is wrong with those guys, behind those sunny voices.”

“That’s absolutely right,” said Halders, “but why not forget it for two and a half minutes? After that the song is over.”

Aneta chose not to listen. She saw Anette’s face in front of her again.

“She seems to be in constant movement between different addresses. On the run between them,” she said.

Halders nodded.

“Isn’t that a common pattern?”

“But she has her family,” said Aneta.

“Yes?”

“But they don’t seem to offer any protection. Or support.”

“Well, she’s not the only one keeping her distance there,” said Halders.

“What do you mean?”

“Her father. We stumbled into his business through his daughter.
He hadn’t counted on you getting stuck on this. Maybe not even on you showing up in his … Anette’s apartment.”

“Business?”

“He’s sure as shit involved in this stolen goods ring. The theft ring. But how would we have known that if it weren’t for his daughter?”

“Does she know, do you think? Is she afraid of
that,
too?”

“Maybe
that
is exactly what she’s afraid of,” said Halders. “That he might think that she will expose it.” He put the quiche pan on the table. There was already a bowl of salad there, and a little bottle of dressing. “It might be her father’s shady dealings she’s running away from.” Halders looked up. “He’s sure as shit trying to keep us away from his daughter. And her problems. And her husband, Frützblatt. His sister. And so on.”

“Yes,” said Aneta, “but it’s not her dad she’s afraid of, not primarily. I’m sure. It’s the threat from Forsblad.”

“Why doesn’t she say so straight out, then?”

“I think she is,” said Aneta. “We’re just not listening well enough.”

“And now she’s on her way to that cabin by the sea?”

“That’s what she said.”

Halders cut a piece of ham and cheese quiche and lifted her plate.

“You sound skeptical.”

“Well, I don’t think she trusts anyone. Including me.”

“Why the beach house?”

“Maybe it’s the only place where she can feel safe,” Aneta said.

That night she dreamed that she was driving on a narrow road that led her between low trees that were lit up by her headlights. Everything was black outside. Above her was the sky, but it was also the sea. How she knew that, she didn’t know. It was the dream that told her.

Somewhere, a woman was singing with a cracked voice, or screaming. She heard the sound of waves from above. Even in a dream, where you accept everything, she thought that it was wrong. Why was the water above her?

In the light from her headlights stood her mother.

Her mother made a gesture she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that her mother wanted to stop her, there on the road.